Recently, 43 disabled protesters were arrested outside of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's office, and the clips went viral on social media. Since then, activists have kept up the pressure on the Republican health bill with similar actions across the country. For this short documentary, The Atlantic traveled to the heart of the disability rights movement in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn why some people with disabilities fear the Republican health plan. Mary Lou Breslin of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund says cuts to Medicaid could ultimately cost 3 million people with disabilities their freedom, and erode "40 years of hard won gains by the disability rights movement."
Taking an axe to Medicaid will prob'ly not leave all of these folks without some kind of coverage - it will just make sure that the Rent-Seekers and Profit-Takers will collect even more tax dollars than they're getting now.
The GOP is using that reliable scare-word, "Socialism", so they can change Medicaid to something that's more lucrative for their buddies and their in-laws. Which equates to an effort to morph the thing into "Socializing Cost in order to generate Private Profit".
It's weird because the guys who're always bitching about the incompetence and inefficiency of Da Gubmint are the ones who're taking one of the very few federal programs that is actually cost-effective, and making it grossly inefficient by trying to shoehorn it into a business model based almost solely on an ideological belief - which obviously doesn't work for such things - which is why we hit on the idea of Medicaid in the first fuckin' place.
We've tried this All-Things-Privatized before. The whole world has tried this before - it was called Monarchy (aka: Daddy State - in one form or another).
240 years ago, some smart guys figured out that that was a pretty fucked up way to do things if the point of the exercise is to live your life without having to pay rent on the air you breathe, and the water you drink, and the dirt you grow your own food in.
And yet, for reasons passing understanding, the rubes who're always yelling "American Exceptionalism" are the ones enthusiastically buying into the plan to take us back to Government-By-Class-Based-Economic-System, to which the US was founded to be the fucking exception.
